Probably the greatest significance of Norm Macdonald’s
new Netflix standup special
Hitler’s Dog
comes with the sparklingly succinct way Macdonald answers
the industry’s political correctness controversies
, at least from a comedian’s perspective, by situating some of the most repugnant and inflammatory remarks possible in the mouth of a made-up character, the titular dictator’s canine. Of course onstage it’s just Macdonald, in a suit humbly paired with dad sneakers, speaking the corrosive words. So, silly though they sound, with the wrong edit you might mistake them for Macdonald’s own views. “This is why we ask that you don’t use recording devices,” Macdonald says as a bumper to the bit.

Macdonald seems to be suggesting comedy comes from the same pocket of theatrical
what-if
as fiction or song, a hypothetical place, and shouldn’t be confused for advocacy—or anything to be argued with. You can find a song or a movie’s content objectionable, no doubt, but don’t treat it like it’s
really real
; that Macdonald manages to communicate this without either polemic or defiance is an achievement of restraint.

Macdonald has worked in similar material before, like
on Dennis Miller’s radio show
when he toyed with the idea of a Holocaust-denying ventriloquist’s dummy, but here Macdonald folds the routine in with further explorations into the nature of reality, honesty, or the difference between immediate experience and imagination—so that the playing with masks gains in this case an added dimension in quite philosophical terrain.

For example, early in the special Macdonald muses on the existential horror of compulsive honesty, prompted by George Washington’s boyhood myth of the cherry tree. Later he revisits the struggle to tell the truth with a novel approach: “I thought of a way of not lying and I’ll share it with you if you like,” Macdonald says. “You can tell the truth, word for word absolutely true, but when you do it you use a sarcastic accent.” It becomes a gag about identity theft and heinous crimes all concealed by such a facetious “confession”—but again and again, between bits about autoerotic asphyxiation or the Six Million Dollar Man’s hearing aid, Macdonald returns to the subject of how arrangements of language and this interplay between literal and deceptive truths shape our minds’ interpretation of the world.

IMAGINE 2020

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